Extended Road Test: 1971 Chevrolet Custom 10 Pickup truck
or
How to get a $500 MGB from Reno to Sunnyvale in only 13 hours,
if you don't count spending half the previous day getting the
truck and the trailer in the same place
As everyone on the SOL list (whatever it stands for) knows, Pete
Gregory reluctantly sold the MGB project car that he inherited
from a friend. I wasn't the least bit reluctant about going to
get it, as it represented a terrific savings on things I needed
either for my street B or for next year's E Production race car.
The only problem was that Pete lives in Reno and the Grizzlies
Sunnyvale, a mere 500-mile round trip. I've got a trailer, and
a fine one too, designed to pull MGBs (it came with my racer).
But the only car in the GFHRS,BaCDC with a trailer hitch is The
Milennium Falcon. ("What a piece of junk!" "Yeah, well I've
made a lot of special modifications...") Two years ago I drove
the Falcon from southern California, about 400 miles, but not
pulling a trailer, and not with its current dried, leaking and
shot engine oil seals. I might make it to Reno. If I'd tried
to tow an MGB with it, I'd probably still be in Donner Pass,
with a bunch of the locals pointing at me and sniggering with
an odd anticipation in their eyes, as they whetted their cleavers
and asked me if I'd join them at the barbecue.
So I toyed with several ideas. I actually went so far as to
visit a Chevy dealership and test-drive two different trucks,
a new full-size with the fuel-injected 5.7L (we used to know
it as the 350) and an S-10, the compact truck, with the 4.3L
V6 (basically the back three cylinders off the 5.7) and a
nice Getrag 5-speed.
Well, the full-size truck was BIG. Really BIG. As in "You may
think it's a long way down the street to the chemists, but that's
nothing to this truck." Great motor, though. The S-10 was more
my size, comfortable and punchy. We managed to elude the sales
golem but were foolish enough to have my credit union process a
loan for us. By the next day, we'd come to our senses and decided
to pass on the deal. (I still need a truck but it's not the right
time for a brand-new one.)
So I wondered what to do. Should I call Pete again -- I'd already
missed him once and had to reschedule -- or will he think I'm a
complete flake and give the MG to whatever passes for a Valley Girl
in Reno? I looked into renting a truck (since I have the trailer)
and at $80 a day and $0.17 a mile, well, the cost-effectiveness of
this purchase was looking dimmer.
Then it hit me, at midnight Thursday. Andy Banta (no user serviceable
parts inside) had offered to lend me his truck, the same one we'd
used to bring my race car back from the cornfields, but he was in a
cast from some torn ligaments and was using the truck as daily
transportation (the only vehicle with a slushbox). My only vehicle
with a slushbox, the '65 Chevelle Super Sport, was in mechanical
condition slightly worse than the Falcon.
I jumped up bolt upright in bed and said, "I'll rent Andy a car and
then I can use his truck!" "Gmmmphluhhg," said Kim, who had been
asleep for half an hour or so.
In the morning, Andy proved amenable to the idea, and we discovered
a second use to being an SCCA member (the first being that you can
set your points gap with the membership card, which is about .015"
thick): Hertz gives SCCA members $5 off a day's rental price, which
brings them in under anyone else. So Saturday morning I acquired a
white Ford Tempo, a vehicle that could single-handedly account for
at least 75% of the Honda Accord sales in the U.S., picked up a
box of fresh, warm doughnuts from Stan's, and went over to wake Andy
and get started on the day.
"You in a big hurry?" Andy asked over a buttermilk doughnut. Well,
I *did* have some ten or twelve hours of driving ahead of me, but...
"I think we should change the oil in the truck. I haven't changed
it since I bought it, and Jeff couldn't remember changing it when
he owned it --" That was convincing.
Maintenance operations on the 1971 Chevy are a snap, since it rides
high enough that I could wriggle under the truck without having to
jack it up. Andy got the oil drain nut off and pulled the filter,
I installed the new one and we put in five quarts of Castrol GTX.
A little coolant, a dash of brake fluid, and we're ready!
I made it home, familiarizing myself with the controls. Not that
there are many: a wheel, two pedals, and a gear selector on the
column. The seats are supportive and familiar: they're the buckets
out of Andy's MGB-GT, bolted to the frame of the original bench seat.
The truck rides like, well, like a truck, its non-assisted steering
stiff and sloppy at the same time, its non-assisted brakes doing
an excellent job of slowing the truck. Mainly, though, I enjoyed
the motor. Oil pressure (with the new Castrol) was almost exactly
the same as the brand-new, 30-miles-on-the-odometer truck I'd
driven on the dealer's lot Tuesday night, 30 psi or so at idle and
45 or so at highway speed. But it felt strong enough to pull my
house to Reno and back.
Then it was time to wrestle the trailer onto the truck, fighting a
rusty tongue and clanking the chains into position. I drove the
truck-and-trailer around the block once to check it out. Oh yeah,
it'd probably be nicer if I lifted the tongue wheel, and if I
tightened the safety chains so they don't actually drag on the
ground. But by now it was 1:00 and I started adding up the hours,
allowing for a slower return trip, and when I got to 2 AM, Kim
said, "I'll pay you the cost of an extra day's rental if you don't
have to drive an unfamiliar truck and trailer at 2 in the morning."
Pete had travel plans the next day, though, which meant we had a
window that closed about 11:00. That meant getting up at 4:30,
leaving the house at 5 AM, and making good time across the state
and over the Sierras to Reno. Oh well, I thought, adding up again
the cost of everything I intended to use on this MGB and realizing
that the difference was well into four figures.
One of the Really Stupid Things that I do, whenever I know I have
to get up at some ungodly hour, is to wake up every two hours or
so and look at the clock to see if it's time to get up yet. In
this, though, it's clear that Kim and I are soul mates. At 4:28,
she nudged me and said, "Your alarm will go off in two minutes.
Get up now and I'll turn it off before it rings."
Throw on jeans, an Austin-Healey T-shirt, shoes. Kim made a pot
of coffee while I started getting the tires into the back of the
truck. I fired it up, eased it down the road to keep the neighbors
from torching my house, and was on my way.
Dark, bumps, rain, and morons plagued me while I learned about
trailering. The dark and the rain would go away but the bumps
and the morons got worse as the day wore on. I don't know what
it is about a trailer, but people seem to want to ride right
next to it, especially when you either need to change lanes or
when you're going onto a narrow bridge with concrete walls on
either side of it.
I found Pete's house easily, backed the trailer into his
driveway and set about putting my wire wheels onto the MGB.
We got that done, hooked the B onto the winch on my trailer,
and hauled it into position. I chained down the front end
(we'd pulled it on back-end first), Pete sat on one of the
wings while I hooked a tie-down through the towing eyes,
we counted hundred dollar bills, and I was on my way.
Except for the flat left tire on the trailer. "It's a six-
ply," Pete said, "so it's pretty stiff. You should be able to
make it to the Chevron station at the next exit and either
get air or get it fixed."
On the way there I learned about braking while towing 2500 pounds
or so. It takes a lot longer, especially when the road is covered
with sand. Thank goodness for the driving schools and autocrossing
I've done, I managed to keep it in a straight line and made the
note to myself to allow LOTS of slowing distance.
Ten pounds of air brought the tire back up to its proper rating,
though I noticed a warning about not exceeding 32 psi at the risk
of a fatal explosion. I hate fatal explosions, so I left the
tire about 30 psi. Fortunately, I could see the tire in my mirror
so I kept an eye on it.
The trip home was exciting, and somehow I doubt that I'll be quite
as excited while racing the E Production car next year, unless it
catches fire or I'm strafed by MiG 19s using heat-seeking missiles
or the ground opens up to swallow me at the entrance to turn 7.
This is the official technique for merging onto a crowded freeway
when you see a truck pulling a sports car on a trailer: You match
your speed exactly with the truck by matching its position as you
come up the on-ramp. You try to get the front wheels of your car
and the truck exactly parallel as you come to the last twenty feet
or so of the ramp. Then comes the tricky part: You have to *do
what the truck does* -- if the truck slows to let you in, you
slow to retain the gemoetric relationship. If the truck speeds up,
you have to speed up for the same reasons.
It was so clear that none of these people were rocket scientists
that I was beginning to wonder if there was a rocket scientists'
convention somewhere other than the West Coast that day. These
people probably couldn't have told which end of the rocket you
put the monkey in. In fact, these people probably couldn't have
remembered which lever to pull in order to make the banana come out.
But the best part was when the wind and the bumps came back, on
the way to the Carquinez Bridge (another of the best parts of the
day). The crosswinds here are vigorous, coming in off the bay
and before that, from the Pacific. In a small, light, aerodynamic
car, you can feel them buffeting the vehicle and making it want
to jump out of its lane. In a large truck with the drag of a
billboard, pulling a trailer, it's something else entirely. The
trailer would get this fascinating rocking motion, which
reminded me of nothing so much as the way the blood pulses through
your temples as you're about to die of spinal meningitis, in a
sort of increasing throb that is either going to explode or just
die down, quietly, till the next spasm. I could tell that the
widening swings of the trailer were not going to be a good thing
in about three seconds, so I guessed -- right, apparently -- and
just lifted, let the trailer's weight come up on the truck and
damp its oscillations, then braked slowly to get the speed down.
We kept it at 50 till I was out of the wind.
At one point, after the driver of a VW Jetta tried to kill himself in
a particularly messy fashion by getting sideways on an attempted
blind-side pass between me and a semi with a 20-mph speed differential,
I realized what made this fine old truck so special. If VWs have
Fahrvergnuegen, loosely translated as an affinity for driving, then
this truck has Schlepvergnuegen. You can schlep an amazing amount
of stuff in this truck, and it just does the right thing.
I made it home a little after five PM, realizing that it would have
been 1 AM if I'd tried to make it the previous day and I still had to
get the car off the trailer. Backing a truck and trailer is one
of life's more fascinating skills, I have determined. It's not just
counterintuitive, it's counterintuitive at random. You get it started
with the wheel turned backwards, and the trailer gets going the right
way for a while before it starts turning the wrong way. So you turn the
wheels on the truck the opposite way, and then the trailer goes
*farther* the wrong way. So you straighten the truck. By now, the
transmission is getting warm and it wants to jump on you as you
shift in and out of reverse, which makes the trailer hop in an
exciting and dramatic manner. Not only that, but the street, which
has had about as much activity as the average undiscovered tomb
for the majority of the day, now suddenly finds itself filled with
carloads of screaming children and drivers who make the average
New Yorker look like Miss Manners. After probably not more than an
hour and a half of this, we got the trailer oriented more or less
where we wanted it, so I disconnected and parked the truck.
We rolled the MGB off the trailer and into the scrupulously clean
spot in the garage, where Kim's work had paid off. (An unknown
benefit was the discovery of half a dozen half-bottles of a 1985
River Glen dessert riesling, a wonderful botrytised wine harvested
at 35 degrees Brix and with 19.3 percent residual sugar, the color
and delicate yet opverpowering sweetness of cherry blossom honey.)
I started beaming as I looked at three MGBs, all mine now.
Yeah, I guess it was worth it. The Grizzlies From Hell Race Shop,
Brewery, and Child Development Centre is open for business!
|